by Unknown
He looked again at the potato. He had here something spectacular. This was something he could show at the fair. Like the giant steer he had seen last year, or the two-headed lamb that had been exhibited a few years back. He shook his head. He had never had anything worth showing at the fair, had not even had any vegetables or livestock worth entering in competition. Now, all of a sudden, he had an item worthy of its own booth. A genuine star attraction.
But the fair was not for another four months.
Hell, he thought. He could set up his own exhibit here. Put a little fence around the potato and charge people to look at it. Maybe he’d invite Jack Phelps, Jim Lowry, and some of his closest friends to see it first. Then they’d spread the word, and pretty soon people from miles around would be flocking to see his find.
The potato pulsed in its hole, white flesh quivering rhythmically, sending shivers of dirt falling around it. The farmer wiped a band of sweat from his forehead with a handkerchief, and he realized that he no longer felt repulsed by the sight before him.
He felt proud of it.
The farmer awoke from an unremembered dream, retaining nothing but the sense of loss he had experienced within the dream’s reality. Though it was only three o’clock, halfway between midnight and dawn, he knew he would not be able to fall back asleep, and he got out of bed, slipping into his Levi’s. He went into the kitchen, poured himself some stale orange juice from the refrigerator, and stood by the screen door, staring out across the field toward the spot where he’d unearthed the living potato. Moonlight shone down upon the field, creating strange shadows, giving the land a new topography. Although he could not see the potato from this vantage point, he could imagine how it looked in the moonlight, and he shivered, thinking of the cold, pulsing, gelatinous flesh.
He should have killed it, he thought. He should have stabbed it with the shovel, chopped it into bits, gone over it with the plow.
He finished his orange juice, placing the empty glass on the counter next to the door. He couldn’t go back to sleep, and he didn’t feel like watching TV, so he stared out at the field, listening to the silence. It was moments like these, when he wasn’t working, wasn’t eating, wasn’t sleeping, when his body wasn’t occupied with something else, that he felt Murial’s absence the most acutely. It was always there—a dull ache that wouldn’t go away—but when he was by himself like this, with nothing to do, he felt the true breadth and depth of his loneliness, felt the futility and pointlessness of his existence.
The despair building within him, he walked outside onto the porch. The wooden boards were cold and rough on his bare feet. He found himself, unthinkingly, walking down the porch steps, past the front yard, into the field. Here, the blackness of night was tempered into a bluish-purple by the moon, and he had no trouble seeing where he was going.
He walked, almost instinctively, to the spot where the living potato lay in the dirt. He had, in the afternoon, gingerly moved it out of the hole, with the help of Jack Phelps, burying the hole, and had gathered together the materials for a box to be placed around it. The potato had felt cold and slimy and greasy, and both of them had washed their hands immediately afterward, scrubbing hard with Lava. Now the boards lay in scattered disarray in the dirt, like something that had been torn apart rather than something which had not yet been built.
He looked down at the bluish-white form, pulsing slowly and evenly, and the despair he had felt, the loneliness, left him, dissipating outward in an almost physical way. He stood rooted in place, too stunned to move, wondering at the change that had come instantly over him. In the darkness of night, the potato appeared phosphorescent, and it seemed to him somehow magical. Once again, he was glad he had not destroyed his discovery, and he felt good that other people would be able to see and experience the strange phenomenon. He stood there for awhile, not thinking, not doing anything, and then he went back to the house, stepping slowly and carefully over rocks and weeds this time. He knew that he would have no trouble falling asleep.
In the morning it had moved. He did not know how it had moved—it had no arms or legs or other means of locomotion—but it was now definitely closer to the house. It was also bigger. Whereas yesterday it had been on the south side of his assembled boards, it was now well to the north, and it had increased its size by half. He was not sure he would be able to lift it now, even with Jack’s help.
He stared at the potato for awhile, looking for some sort of trail in the dirt, some sign that the potato had moved itself, but he saw nothing.
He went into the barn to get his tools.
He had finished the box and gate for the potato, putting it in place, well before seven o’clock. It was eight o’clock before the first carload of people arrived. He was in the living room, making signs to post oil telephone poles around town and on the highway, when a station wagon pulled into the drive. He walked out onto the porch and squinted against the sun.
“This where y’got that monster tater?” a man called out. Several people laughed.
“This is it,” the farmer said. “It’s a buck a head to see it, though.”
“A buck?” The man got out of the car. He looked vaguely familiar, but the farmer didn’t know his name. “Jim Lowry said it was fifty cents.”
“Nope.” The farmer turned as if to go in to the house.
“We’ll still see it, though,” the man said. “We came all this way, we might as well see what it’s about.”
The farmer smiled. He came off the porch, took a dollar each from the man, his brother, and three women, and led them out to the field. He should have come up with some kind of pitch, he thought, some sort of story to tell, like they did with that steer at the fair. He didn’t want to just take the people’s money, let them look at the potato and leave. He didn’t want them to feel cheated. But he couldn’t think of anything to say.
He opened the top of the box, swinging open the gate, and explained in a stilted, halting manner how he had found the potato. He might as well have saved his breath. None of the customers gave a damn about what he was saying. They didn’t even pay any attention to him. They simply stared at the huge potato in awe, struck dumb by this marvel of nature. For that’s how he referred to it. It was no longer an abomination, it was a marvel. A marvel of nature. A miracle. And the people treated it as such.
Two more cars pulled up soon after, and the farmer left the first group staring while he collected money from the newcomers.
After that, he stayed in the drive, collecting money as people arrived, pointing them in the right direction and allowing them to stay as long as they wanted. Customers came and went with regularity, but the spot next to the box was crowded all day, and by the time he hung a “Closed” sign on the gate before dark, he had over a hundred dollars in his pocket.
He went out to the field, repositioned the box, closed the gate, and retreated into the house. It had been a profitable day.
Whispers. Low moans. Barely audible sounds of despair so forlorn that they brought upon him a deep, dark depression, a loneliness so complete that he wept like a baby in his bed, staining the pillows with his tears.
He stood up after awhile and wandered around the house. Every room seemed cheap and shabby, the wasted effort of a wasted life, and he fell into his chair before the TV, filled with utter hopelessness, lacking the energy to do anything but stare into the darkness.
In the morning, everything was fine. In the festive, almost carnival-like atmosphere of his exhibition, he felt rejuvenated, almost happy. Farmers who had not been out of their overalls in ten years showed up in their Sunday best, families in tow. Little Jimmy Hardsworth’s lemonade stand, set up by the road at the head of the drive, was doing a thriving business, and there were more than a few repeat customers from the day before.
The strange sounds of the night before, the dark emotions, receded into the distance of memory.
He was kept busy all morning, taking money, talking to people with questions. The police came by with a town
official, warning him that if this went on another day he would have to buy a business license, but he let them look at the potato and they were quiet after that. There was a lull around noon, and he left his spot near the head of the drive and walked across the field to the small crowd gathered around the potato. Many of his crops had been trampled, he noticed. His rows had been flattened by scores of spectator feet. He’d have to take a day off tomorrow and take care of the farm before it went completely to hell.
Take a day off.
It was strange how he’d come to think of the exhibition as his work, of his farm as merely an annoyance he had to contend with. His former devotion to duty was gone, as were his plans for the farm.
He looked down at the potato. It had changed. It was bigger than it had been before, more misshapen. Had it looked like this the last time he’d seen it! He hadn’t noticed. The potato was still pulsing, and its white skin looked shiny and slimy. He remembered the way it had felt when he’d lifted it, and he unconsciously wiped his hands on his jeans.
Why was it that he felt either repulsed or exhilarated when he was around the potato?
“It’s sum’in, ain’t it?” the man next to him said. The farmer nodded.
“Yeah, it is.”
He could not sleep that night. He lay in bed, staring up at the cracks in the ceiling, listening to the silence of the farm. It was some time before he noticed that it was not silence he was hearing—there was a strange, high-pitched keening sound riding upon the low breeze which fluttered the curtains.
He sat up in bed, back flat against the headboard. It was an unearthly sound, unlike anything he had ever heard, and he listened carefully. The noise rose and fell in even cadences, in a rhythm not unlike that of the pulsations of the potato. He turned his head to look out the window. He thought he could see a rounded object in the field, bluish-white in the moonlight, and he remembered that he could not see it at all the night before.
It was getting closer.
He shivered, and he closed his eyes against the fear. But the high-pitched whines were soothing, comforting, and they lulled him gently to sleep.
When he awoke, he went outside before showering or eating breakfast, walking out to the field. Was it closer to the house? He couldn’t be sure. But he remembered the keening sounds of the night before, and a field of goose bumps popped up on his arms. The potato definitely looked more misshapen than it had before, its boundaries more irregular. If it was closer, he thought, so was the box he had built around it. Everything had been moved.
But that wasn’t possible.
He walked back to the house, ate, showered, dressed, and went to the foot of the drive, where he put up a chain between the two flanking trees and hung a sign which read: “Closed for the Day.”
There were chores to be done, crops to water, animals to be fed, work to be completed.
But he did none of these things. He sat alone on a small bucket, next to the potato, staring at it, hypnotized by its pulsations, as the sun rose slowly to its peak, then dipped into the west.
Murial was lying beside him, not moving, not talking, not even touching him, but he could feel her warm body next to his and it felt right and good. He was happy, and he reached over and laid a hand on her breast. “Murial,” he said. “I love you.”
And then he knew it was a dream, even though he was still in it, because he had never said those words to her, not in the entire thirty-three years they had been married. It was not that he had not loved her, it was that he didn’t know how to tell her. The dream faded into reality, the room around him growing dark and old, the bed growing large and cold. He was left with only a memory of that momentary happiness, a memory which taunted him and tortured him and made the reality of the present seem lonelier and emptier than even he had thought it could seem.
Something had happened to him recently. Depression had graduated to despair, and the tentative peace he had made with his life had all but vanished. The utter hopelessness which had been gradually pressing in on him since Murial’s death had enveloped him, and he no longer had the strength to fight it.
His mind sought out the potato, though he lacked even the energy to look out the window to where it lay in the field. He thought of its strangely shifting form, of its white, slimy skin, of its even pulsations, and he realized that just thinking of the object made him feel a little better.
What was it?
That was the question he had been asking himself ever since he’d found the potato. He wasn’t stupid. He knew it wasn’t a normal tuber. But neither did he believe that it was a monster or a being from outer space or some other such movie nonsense.
He didn’t know what it was, but he knew that it had been affecting his life ever since he’d discovered it, and he was almost certain that it had been responsible for the emotional roller coaster he’d been riding the past few days.
He pushed aside the covers and stood up, looking out the window toward the field. Residual bad feelings fled from him, and he could almost see them flying toward the potato as if they were tangible, being absorbed by that slimy white skin. The potato offered no warmth, but it was a vacuum for the cold. He received no good feelings from it, but it seemed to absorb his negative feelings, leaving him free from depression, hopelessness, despair.
He stared out the window and thought he saw something moving out in the field, blue in the light of the moon.
The box was still in the field, but the potato was lying on the gravel in front of the house. In the open, freed from the box, freed from shoots and other encumbrances, it had an almost oval shape, and its pulsing movements were quicker, more lively.
The farmer stared at the potato, unsure of what to do. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he had been half-hoping that the potato would die, that his life would return to normal. He enjoyed the celebrity, but the potato scared him.
He should have killed it the first day.
Now he knew that he would not be able to do it, no matter what happened.
“Hey!” Jack Phelps came around the side of the house from the back. “You open today? I saw some potential customers driving back and forth along the road, waiting.”
The farmer nodded tiredly. “I’m open.”
Jack invited him to dinner, and the farmer accepted. It had been a long time since he’d had a real meal, a meal cooked by a woman, and it sounded good. He also felt that he could use some company tonight.
But none of the talk was about crops or weather or neighbors the way it used to be. The only thing Jack and Myra wanted to talk about was the potato. The farmer tried to steer the conversation in another direction, but he soon gave it up, and they talked about the strange object. Myra called it a creature from Hell, and though Jack tried to laugh it off and turn it into a joke, he did not disagree with her.
When he returned from the Phelpses’ it was after midnight. The farmer pulled into the dirt yard in front of the house and cut the headlights, turning off the ignition. With the lights off, the house was little more than a dark, hulking shape blocking out a portion of the starlit sky. He sat unmoving, hearing nothing save the ticking of the pickup’s engine as it cooled. He stared at the dark house for a few moments longer, then got out of the pickup and clomped up the porch steps, walking through the open door into the house.
The open door?
There was a trail of dirt on the floor, winding in a meandering arc through the living room into the hail, but he hardly noticed it. He was filled with an unfamiliar emotion, an almost pleasant feeling he had not experienced since Murial died. He did not bother to turn on the house lights but went into the dark bathroom, washed his face, brushed his teeth, and got into his pajamas.
The potato was waiting in his bed.
He had known it would be there, and he felt neither Panic nor exhilaration. There was only a cairn acceptance. In the dark, the blanketed form looked almost like Murial, and he saw two lumps protruding upward which looked remarkably like breasts.
He got i
nto bed and pulled the other half of the blanket over himself, snuggling close to the potato. The pulsations of the object mirrored the beating of his own heart.
He put his arms around the potato. “I love you,” he said.
He hugged the potato tighter. Crawling on top of it, and as his arms and legs sank into the soft, slimy flesh, he realized that the potato was not odd at all.
SATURN
Ian McDowell
Not every story in this anthology has to be dealing from the bottom of a new deck. Sometimes a more traditionally executed tale can work its way in simply by being well-written and cleanly plotted—as long as it’s not some tired old idea. The next tale is a good example of what I’m talking about. Its author, Ian McDowell, lives in Greensboro, North Carolina, where he earned a master’s degree in English Literature. He’s had several stories in magazines such as F&SF and Asimov’s, plus an appearance in Karl Wagner’s Year’s Best Horror anthology, and his latest offering is a grim little love story… kind of.
Returning with the Sunday New York Times, he found Jan gone and Michael’s skull resting on the coffee table, next to Jan’s half-empty Far Side mug. It was smaller than he remembered it, no bigger than a squeezed orange. The left orbit and much of the zygomatic arch were gone, and dark soil spilled out of the tiny brain pan onto the varnished table top. He could smell the garden through the open French doors, and when he walked across the room to see if Jan was outside, he saw more dirt on the stoop, as well as several fragments of bone. Jan’s Fiat was gone, and Bodger was curled up asleep in a fresh hole in the geranium bed. It wasn’t hard to figure out what had happened.